" asks Dominic Sardone, Safe Sex Plus' senior vice president of marketing. According to Howard Rheingold's 1991 book, Virtual Reality, the word dildonics goes back to 1974, when Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, used it to describe a "device capable of converting sound into tactile sensations."The hype, however, didn't begin until the early '90s, when virtual reality was going to Change Everything.

Like every other shiny new technobauble, VR promised us mind-blowing sex. But not even the ambitious folks at Safe Sex Plus have cracked that barrier.

I was sent a tarted-up pneumatic version and gave it the thumbs down it deserved—it sounded like a jackhammer and could suck the rivets out of the space shuttle.

After that, I didn't see an Accu-Jack outside of the occasional campy porn flick, but I knew this classic gizmo was out there somewhere.

Even when supplemented with those golf-ball cameras that allow lovers to watch each other, the Robo Suck experience is Bronze Age crude.